(Karaoke Wishlist is a semi-regular collection of old and new songs that are maddeningly hard to find at karaoke bars)
1) Michael Jackson, “It’s the Falling in Love” tied with “Baby Be Mine”
You have to go pretty deep into MJ’s catalog to find a song that isn’t available at karaoke; along with the Beatles and Elvis, he’s one of the best-represented sing-along artists of all time (you can even find “Liberian Girl,” which I’ve always mistakenly referred to as “Librarian Girl” every time it’s brought up in casual conversation, which doesn’t really happen a lot). So here are two relatively rare Jackson tracks, which I’m sure are available at karaoke bars in Dubai, but difficult to find stateside: “It’s the Falling in Love,” from Off the Wall, is a tipsy homage to ’70s Philly-soul; on any other album, it would have been a smash, but it’s tough to stand out among the likes of “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” or “Rock With You.” As for “Baby Be Mine,” it’s one of only two Thriller tracks not released as a single, and that makes sense: Truth be told, it’s probably the eighth-best song on the album, right after “The Girl is Mine,” but above “The Lady in My Life, (the latter of which I’ve never listened to all the way through, despite playing Thriller so much as a child that my grandmother once threatened to whack me on the head if I didn’t stop talking about Michael Jackson.
2) Mclusky, “To Hell With Good Intentions” I miss the days when “college rock” was performed by people who (possibly) never went to college. It’s hard to imagine the Decemberists writing a lyric like “My love is bigger than your love/We take more drugs than a touring funk band” without having a two-hour band meeting afterward to discuss whether the song was too phallocentric or “ambiguously faux-gauche” or whatever.
3) Bay City Rollers, “Shang-A-Lang” For years, I’d look at all the Bay City Rollers karaoke-bar options and realize I only knew two of the band’s songs (I was born in the mid-’70s, and not as a screaming teenage girl, so they weren’t exactly a priority growing up). But I’ve been listening to the a BCR best-of pretty much non-stop during the last few weeks, and now that I’m finally ready for “Shang-A-Lang,” it’s suddenly disappeared from my regular songbooks. I blame the Gravy Robbers.
4) Taking Back Sunday, “Sink Into Me” Many, many years ago, some music critic dismissed the ’90s post-punk band Quicksand with a terse three-word review that read, “Fugazi sells out.” I always thought that was kind of lazy summary, but after listening to this song, I’ll be damned if I can think of a better way to describe it other than, “Quicksand sells out, but only after listening to Heaven Tonight repeatedly, so it’s all good.”
5) Michael Jackson, “Burn This Disco Out” I can’t help myself; the past few days have just been too Jackson-intensive. Can somebody please whack me on the head?
I recently worked on an extensive oral history for Spin magazine on the 25th anniversary of Purple Rain (the story’s not online, but the issue is on newsstands now). Most of the interviewees were Prince collaborators from that era, but I did wind up talking for a few minutes with Ahmir “?uestlove” Thompson, the drummer for the Roots. As it turns out, he’s a bit of scholar on Purple Rain, and since I couldn’t fit all of his observations in the story, I thought I’d reprint them here:
I wasn’t allowed to see Purple Rain. My two trips to see it in the movie theatre were foiled by my parents. Then I tried to pull a fast one by spending the night in my grandma’s house, and trying to see it with my cousins. My grandmother was like, “They going to the the movies,” and my mom was like, “Ahmir is not allowed to see Purple Rain. He can see Footloose, but not Purple Rain.” When I was a kid, a lot of my R-rated experiences with movies—or any other type of pop culture—had to be experienced second-hand, via the recapping and the recollections of friends. Eventually, when it came out on videotape, my friend got it for Christmas in 1985, and I watched it.
I always say that Prince really started hip-hop culture, whether the historians want to view it or not. Everything in that film mirrored hip-hop culture. You have Prince himself, a very unsual-looking figure. Most of the mavericks in hip-hop have a very distinct physical trait about them. Prince is about five feet tall, and a musical genius, [and] pretty much anybody that’s considered a musical genius in hip-hop has some sort of physical feature about them that’s odd, i.e. Biggie’s lazy eye. And then the whole idea of beefs—Prince and Morris. Morris’ whole pimp attitude, that was something you didn’t hear since the blaxploitation films of the early ’70s.
[There was also] the innovative use of drum machines, definitely a first in synth music. “When Doves Cry” is pretty much the first ringtone pop hit. It’s bookended by an intricate Egyptian chord in the beginning and a sort of classical run at the end, but in between it’s a very sparse, one-note affair.
And he definitely invented the video ho. Before Purple Rain, brothers had a hard time embracing a bikini-clad, high-heel-boot sporting, five-foot Midwest, light-skinned guy with a high falsetto. But the second after my block saw the “When Doves Cry,” and he was getting on Apollonia. That changed a lot of opinions.
There’s a chapter in Don’t Stop Believin’ about Dimples, a great dive in Burbank, Ca., that bills itself as “the oldest karaoke bar in the Western hemisphere” (you can get a preview of the chapter here). Dimples has a long, weird history, but it’s best known for drawing such celebrities as Keifer Sutherland and Britney Spears, and no celebrity has made more appearances on the stage than Dennis Haskins, a.k.a. Mr. Belding from Saved By the Bell. Apparently, Haskins performed at the bar recently with Kermit the Frog (either that, or somebody has access to a fairly legit-looking Kermit puppet, and he’s been farming it out). It’s amusing, but this will always be my favorite Muppet duet:
I wrote an upcoming Spin cover story on the 25th anniversary of Purple Rain. I’ll post a link to the article when it’s up later this month, but for now, Spin.com has an MP3 from a Purple tribute album the magazine put together: It’s “When Doves Cry,” as performed by Greg Dulli and Apollonia.
I did a quick item on VH1’s Best Week Ever for the new issue of New York magazine, which you can find here. Though I loved BWE when it first premiered, I stopped tuning regularly in a few seasons back: Not only were the show’s talking-head commentators seemingly engaging in a clamorous game of zing-zang one-upmanship, but with the advent of Blogger and Wordpress, we suddenly had a national surfeit of wise-ass pop-culture arbiters. I simply didn’t need any more twentysomethings opining on Tommy Lee Goes to College.
But Best Week Ever is now Best Week Ever with Paul F. Tompkins, and that makes a huge difference. Tompkins is a great stand-up and comic actor, one who starred in one of my favorite sketches of the last 20 years. But more importantly, he seems to have a healthy relationship with popular culture. And by “healthy”, I mean he avoids the “this sucks”/”this rules” polemics that make up much of today’s critical chatter, instead treating the likes of Jon & Kate + 8 with equal parts reverence and repellence. Best Week Ever is not only a lot funnier nowadays–this season’s one-liners have been far better than the ones found on, say, Weekend Update–it’s also a lot more nuanced, as ridiculous as that may seem.
Anyway, the New York piece is basically a back-and-forth between Tompkins and co-star Doug Benson, during which they riff on summer movies, songs, and TV shows. We had to cut some good one-liners for space, so maybe I’ll try to add them here later today.
I haven’t been posting the last few months, as I’ve been working overtime on a bunch of stories. A few of them came out this week, including this Wired magazine article on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, as well as this New York magazine write-up of Screaming Females, my favorite New Brunswick punk band.
The most time-consuming article, however, has been an oral-history cover story for Spin magazine’s July issue, which will be out in about a month. I can’t say what it’s about, but the psychotic-looking dry-erase board above might give you a few ideas.
According to the BBC, the Swine Flu pandemic has been a boon to Japan’s karaoke business, as stuck-at-home students around the country are now spending their afternoons at the local k-box joint (a k-box is a small, private sing-along room that can be rented by the hour; they’re impossible to miss in cities like Osaka and Tokyo). This seems somewhat counterintuitive, as a crowded k-box is nothing more than a swirling brume of germs and Carpenters songs. But perhaps the Japanese see these karaoke sessions as a sort of cheery quarantine: Many of them live in overcrowded cities, making contact with others nearly unavoidable. If they’re going to exposed, they may as well do it in a controlled environment with a select group of friends, where they can sing “Superstar” and indulge themselves in the many joys of nomihoodai.
…I’ve been hacked twice in the past few weeks, despite several security precautions. I couldn’t deal with the guilt-slash-annoyance of spamming 400+ friends and coworkers with penis-pill ads. Plus, ever since I began using Twitter, I’ve found myself on Facebook less and less. You can still reach me via this site and via brianraftery at gmail dot com.
Aside from the occasional Muppet-related Tweet, I’ve been away from the web for the last few weeks, thanks to a bunch of deadlines all converging upon me at once. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out this footage of Rick Astley singing a karaoke version of “Never Gonna Give You Up” at an Athens, Ga., bar over the weekend (footage via Idolator). It’s a bit like watching the snake eating its own tail, except in this case, the snake looks a bit like Clay Aiken, and it also eats the tail(?) of Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5,” and the whole thing ends with the snake pleading with me to never again use this tired, tortuous analogy. In a man-boyish voice.
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